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A Festival of Fieldfares

 The whole area around our new home near Pirton in Worcestershire feels, with the exception of pit 60 before its painful demise, much more birdy than the countryside around Standlake. Our daily walks are accompanied by a wonderful chorus of Redwings and Fieldfares chattering away in the hedge rows and tree tops. I don’t have a methodology to accurately count them but I would guess they must amount to many thousands. We have velux windows in our kitchen and sun room and I often see them pouring overhead in what resembles a scene from Hitchcock’s famous film the birds.



Once or maybe twice a day the thrushes will descend on mass to the largest of our three ponds for a drink. A  fallen tree at the back of the pond provides the birds with convenient and easy access to the water. It also acts as a very photogenic prop for my photography. I hence set up my new mobile hide last week in the hope and expectation of the Fieldfares arrival. Being at the back of the pond the fallen tree is well lit in the morning and the forecast of three sunny days last week left me hopeful of some good shots. On the first morning a single Fieldfare eventual came down for a drink but kept to the back of the fallen log where it was always partially obscured. On the second morning I could rather frustratingly hear the thrushes all around me in the trees but they resolutely avoided the pond. 






At 13:00 after some four hours I was cold and hungry and at the point of giving up when with a flourish of many wings a flock descended on the fallen tree and started to drink. Talk about going from feast to famine, I was immediately spoilt for choice as to which bird to photograph. In the next 15 minutes I somehow managed to rattle off over a thousand frames. On processing the pictures I discovered that I had set my camera to capture each image as a Jpeg and a RAW file, doubling the amount of images captured. I always shoot in RAW as so much of the captured image is lost in a Jpeg, there’s a reason why they are only 10% the size of a RAW image, greatly reducing the potential for post processing. Although I was using my monster 800mm lens, I knew that significant cropping was going to be required as the closest I could get the hide without getting very wet was some 50 m from the fallen tree.  I hence wanted to get the ISO speed down as low as possible and shot with a minimum shutter speed set to 1/250 of a second and slightly underexposed the shots knowing I could correct them in Lightroom later. The resultant heavily cropped shots show the real image capture power of my Cannon 1DX mark 3 camera body.

 











The other very photogenic regular visitor to our garden is a female Green Woodpecker. I was standing by our stable block last week when I noticed her feeding, presumably on ants,  20 meters or so in front of me. I crept back to the house and grabbed my camera and rested the monster 800mm lens on the gate. To my great delight she flew a few meters to a young Oak tree and kindly posed for long enough for me to rattle off a few shots. There are many suitable looking holes in the Oak trees around our property so I do hope she decides to raise her next family in one of them next spring!



In the midst of lockdown 2.0 I know how incredibly lucky I am to have this wonderful wildlife right next to our house. On Thursday last week I had to venture out to the chemist in Worcester to pick up a prescription.  Given that this was the first day of the new lockdown I was very surprised by the amount of traffic on the roads and the number of people out shopping. The dry cleaning shop next to the chemist was open as was the carpet right  superstore. How on earth can these be deemed essential I wonder?

 

A Greater Yellowlegs in Suffolk, the much rarer American cousin of the Lesser Yellowlegs which I see most years, is a bird I have never seen and would normally have resulted in an immediate twitch but I have no intention of traveling this distance to bird until permitted to do so. Hopefully then it will stay around for a while!

 

Footnote – my blogs are posted with sometimes rather imaginative spelling and grammar due to my extreme dyslexia! 

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